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Sound Like…: Understanding Japanese Sound Symbolism

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Sound Like…: Understanding Japanese Sound Symbolism Sounds Like…: Understanding Japanese Sound Symbolism Naomi Sharlin Bryn Mawr College December 2009 Prologue We are reading a novel in a modern text class at a university in Tokyo. It is slow going. The troubled Japanese girl and her English grandmother make wild strawberry jam and each step in the process is described in great detail. There is a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary. We can guess the meaning of a lot of words based on their characters but nearly all the adverbs, describing how they handle the berries, how the girl walks when she carries the heavy bags of sugar, and how they stir the jam, are written in hiragana , the phonetic alphabet of Japanese. The meanings of these words are hard to guess. The professor patiently explains each one, “To the Japanese ear this motion,” he mimes stirring round and round, “sounds like guru-guru .” He draws a spiral on the board. “This is also guru-guru . When you read the same book over and over again, that is also guru- guru .” Later, walking home from the train, I see a sign I had never noticed before for a shop called Guruguru Bagels . Snails with their spiral shells adorn the awning. I get it! 2 Bagels are circular, snails are also a round-and-round shape, these bagels are so good customers will go back again and again. It is a clever play on words. It is also amazing how many meanings are expressed in those four syllables. Guru-guru is a useful word; surely others like it also have flexible meanings. Why have these pervasive and varied words not featured more prominently in my Japanese education up until now? Introduction The arbitrariness of the relationship between sound and meaning in language has long been accepted as a basic tenet of language since de Saussure’s groundbreaking linguistic work. There is nothing special about the sounds /s/ /t/ /o/ /n/ that conjure up images of hard, dusty objects of various sizes and shapes. Stone, rock, pebble and boulder all describe the same kind of object, yet their syllables have little or nothing in common phonetically. Words that are phonetically similar to these words, however, do not necessarily share their meaning: phone, rake, bubble and molder. This arbitrariness seems essential for the nearly infinite meanings symbolized in human language to be expressed by combinations of a finite number of sound units (Ohala 1983). If each sound unit, or phoneme, carried its own semantic meaning, word formation would be limited both in potential number and meaning. On the whole, this assumption of arbitrariness in language, or in de Saussure’s terms, “the arbitrariness of the sign” holds (1915 [1986]). However, there are exceptions. Many languages have onomatopoetic systems for mimicking at least the sounds of animals and for some sounds objects make. For example meh-meh in Hebrew for the sound a goat makes, cock-a-doodle-doo in English for the sound a rooster makes, ding in English for the sound of a small bell and klonk in German for two dull, heavy objects 3 striking each other with some force. Although arbitrariness in language is essential, many languages have systems of related sound and meaning. Such systems are more developed in some languages than in others. The sound symbolism of Japanese is one such well-developed and productive system. In addition to the onomatopoetic words describing animal sounds and the sounds of objects, it also includes ideophonic or sound symbolic words that describe physical and emotional states. In English, excessive use of onomatopoetic words usually devalues a description, making it sound childish, even silly. For example, describing the sound of your shoes and how you ran for class when you were late as, “I slap-slap ran higgledy-piggledy ” sounds unnatural and unnecessary. This is not the case in Japanese, where sound symbolism makes descriptions more vivid and casual speech sound more natural (Nuckolls 1999). The sound symbolic system in Japanese is a crucial component of the spoken language; one that native-speakers learn early and may help accelerate their language learning, but that non-native speakers particularly those whose native language lacks such a system (e.g. English) struggle to master fluently. While memorizing individual ideophonic words is no different than learning other vocabulary (and may actually be easier due to the widespread reduplicative structure prevalent in sound symbolic words), extrapolating meaning from unfamiliar ideophonic words is more complex. In the case of non-sound-symbolic words the process of extrapolation is similar to that of unfamiliar words in the native language - considering context, roots from known words, etc. – but these strategies do not work with sound symbolism. Instead, the language learner must consider semantic cues within the phonemes. For instance, voiced consonants usually mean bigger actions or effects than 4 unvoiced consonants and high vowels generally denote smaller things than low vowels, etc. (Hiroko 2003). I will explore the meanings of certain phonemes more deeply in Japanese sound symbolism later on. An intuitive understanding of these trends, largely absent in English, is hard to develop in non-native speakers. For native Japanese speakers, however, this intuition develops to the point that the sound symbolic system is productive. Although there are many standardized sound symbolic words, native speakers can also create their own new words easily understood not just semantically, but also emotionally by their peers. A native Japanese speaker described a new sound symbolic word (a clock going hatsu-hatsu-hatsu-hatsu ) she read in a poem as “fresh,” “bright,” “moving” (Koike, 2009). Ideophonics, flexible and welcoming to creativity, seem to take the place of other figurative language (simile, metaphor) generally absent in Japanese. Language learners who never receive sufficient instruction in sound symbolism miss an important tool for expressive communication. Starting with an investigation into why learning sound symbolism is crucial to learning Japanese, this paper suggests a more contextual and culture-oriented approach to foreign language teaching and learning. Along the way, I provide a semantic, phonetic, morphological and syntactic analysis of the Japanese sound symbolic system, and a comparative study of native and non-native acquisition. The factors that influence differences in acquisition will help us teach better as they shed light on how we learn. 1. Why Sound Symbolism Matters Language and culture are interconnected. Whether culture forms around a language or vice versa is a chicken-and-egg question. Cultural norms and assumptions as well as the language itself influence what we express and how, how we think and how we 5 interpret the world around us. Given this link, the question arises of the role of cultural differences in the understanding of non-native sound symbolic systems. Specifically, in the case of native English speaking learners of Japanese, the popular idea of differences between the East Asian and Western minds comes to the fore. The general conception is that East Asian minds tend to have a more holistic view of the world, whereas Western minds are more object focused. This is clearly a sweeping generalization, but it can be useful in evaluating cultural differences. These differences are highlighted not to exoticize or essentialize a culture, but to help increase intercultural understanding for better communication and a greater ability to view situations from varying cultural perspectives. Based on the assumption that East Asian minds tend to “view the world through a wide-angle lens, whereas Westerners have tunnel vision” (Nisbett 2003), two psychologists showed animated, color underwater vignettes to American and Japanese undergraduate students. The scenes all contained at least one fish in the foreground, exceptional in its size, speed and coloration. Each scene also contained slower moving animals, rocks, bubbles and plants. Participants were shown a scene for under a minute and then asked to describe what they had seen. The results showed that Americans tended to notice the focal fish whereas Japanese participants made more than 60% more references to the background elements than Americans did (Masuda & Nisbett 2001). In a true showing of holistic versus object-focused sight, the very first sentence from the Japanese participants was likely to be one referring to the environment (“It looked like a pond”), whereas the first sentence from the Americans was three times as likely to be one referring to the focal fish (“There was a big fish, maybe a trout, moving off to the left”) (Nisbett 2003). 6 In a follow-up study, participants were shown ninety-six objects, half of which were taken from stills from the animated underwater scenes they had seen and half of which were images they had not seen before. Some of the stills from the underwater scenes had altered backgrounds and some were shown in their original environments. Participants were asked whether or not they had seen the objects before. Japanese participants were more likely to recognize objects they had seen before when they were shown with the original background than in a new environment. This suggests that in the mind of the Japanese participant, “the object had become “bound” to the environment when seen initially and remained that way in memory” (Nisbett 2003). The environment in which the object was shown had no impact on whether or not the American participants recognized objects they had seen before. Differences in visual perception suggest differences in brain processing that affect language use and ways of expression. To the more object-focused Western mind, information expressed by sound symbolic words, e.g. nuances of manner, is considered non-essential to clear communication. To the holistically aware East Asian mind, this kind of information is a central part of expressing the whole of an action or situation.
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